Joan Kaufman

Joan Kaufman is the senior director for academic programs at Schwarzman Scholars, a lecturer in global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a visiting professor at Tsinghua University’s Schwarzman College. An expert on public health and China, she has lived and worked in China for 15 years since 1980 for the United Nations, the Ford Foundation, the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative and Columbia University. Prior to joining Schwarzman Scholars, she was the director of Columbia University’s Global Center for East Asia, in Beijing, and associate professor of health policy and management at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. In 2002, she founded and directed, for a decade, the AIDS Public Policy Project at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, working in both China and Vietnam. Her publications cover global health policy, HIV/AIDS, women’s rights, reproductive health, population, emerging infectious diseases, and civil society, with a focus on China. She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.